Wormholes: not just for physicists anymore

A biologist investigates old illustrations to find new data about bugs.

New research published in Biology Letters last week presents evidence that wormholes can advance our knowledge by bridging gaps in time. But no, this isn't the cosmic, theoretical, Star Trek and Sliders kind of wormhole. This research is about holes made by worms and larvae. S. Blair Hedges, a biologist from Penn State University, used wormholes printed in art to examine the historical distribution of wood-boring insects in Europe.

Woodcut printing, which originated in Asia nearly 2,000 years ago, is an artistic way to print text and images. Words, characters, or pictures are carved in relief onto a block of wood, which is then inked and stamped onto paper. This art form was the major method of illustration in books for hundreds of years, from the invention of the printing press until the early 1800s.

Ingeniously, Hedges realized that wormholes embedded in the wood blocks were transferred onto the prints as white dots and tracks, and that these imperfections could be used to identify and track different species of insects throughout history.

Hedges used 473 wormhole-laden prints from across Europe, dated between 1462 and 1899. He identified two species that might have burrowed their way through these European wood blocks: Anobium punctatum, the “common furniture beetle," and Oligomerus ptilinoides, the "Mediterranean furniture beetle." The larvae of these species tend to attack dry hardwood, such as the apple, pear, and boxwood usually used to make the blocks for woodcut prints. Termites, along with many other European insects, prefer softer, drier wood. While these two beetle species now co-occur, there is little knowledge of their historical distribution across Europe.

There was a distinct difference between the wormholes in prints that originated in northern and southern Europe; prints from the north tended to have wormholes that were small and round, whereas southern prints had larger wormholes and were more likely to have “tracks” showing the actual burrows of the larvae. Based on the size and shape of these holes, Hedges determined that the northern wormholes were most likely made by the common furniture beetle, while the southern wormholes match those of its Mediterranean cousin.

Interestingly, the prints showed no evidence that these two species occurred together before the late 1800s; prints had holes made by either one or the other species, not both. It’s likely, therefore, that these two species had distinct geographical boundaries and only came into contact with each other in the last 100 years or so. Hedges suggests that local competition likely played a role in the species’ historical separation, and that the expansion of global trade in the early 20th century may have spread these beetles more widely and helped their ranges overlap.

This creative use of wormholes has much more information to offer; printed wormholes may be able to help researchers understand historical species invasions in other continents, such as Asia, and they could help track the origins of unknown works of woodcut art.

Kate Shaw Yoshida
Kate is a science writer for Ars Technica. She recently earned a dual Ph.D. in Zoology and Ecology, Evolutionary Biology and Behavior from Michigan State University, studying the social behavior of wild spotted hyenas. Emailkate.shaw@arstechnica.com//Twitter@KateYoshida